Wednesday, 20 December 2017

This morning I was helping a small
granddaughter to unwrap coloured balls and partridges without pear trees and
turtle doves a-perching and glass baubles from the Highgrove shop (Oh we do do
a naice class of Christmas kitsch when we put our minds to it. How many people
do you know with HRH's baubles on their plastic, sorry, ecological tree? In
Rome?) when I suddenly recalled the one that she had missed, being born just
too late in January.

I was in London holding a pregnant daughter's hand
(and my wallet) whilst she and I, but mostly she, shopped big time for
Christmas which, as everyone knows, starts three months earlier in London and
is twice as jolly and colourful as anywhere else so that the gospel singers
were already belting out Silent Night (no it wasn't, not at all, very noisy in
fact,) up the Kings Road and the lights were sparkling and the windows were
magical and a wonderful time was being had by all.

Well, we two were enjoying it anyway. The pair of
us had flown over from Rome for a couple of days, much to Ms. Low Cost Air
Hostess’s disapproval and scepticism (“How many weeks into her pregnancy
did you say your daughter was? Do you have any documentation to prove that?”)
Yes, we did, as a matter of fact. Some of us never go anywhere, it appears,
without a copy of our latest uterine scan just in case the conversation runs
out over the dinner table. How times have changed. Remember those floating tent
like garments designed to hide even a triplet bulge? It’s all Flaunt It, now,
and I for one am all for it. With a six month tummy literally in your face, it
is hard to carry on swaying to your iPod or reading your newspaper from the
depths of your comfortable seat on the Underground, so we were offered places
to sit at every turn. And since I was her accompanying baggage, we both got
priority boarded and help with our suitcases and permission to leave our
shopping at strategic points right across London.

Not everyone was having such a merry, stress-free
time, however.

“Well, I think we gained a lot of useful ideas
there, darling, don’t you?” said a Yummy Mummy brightly as she tripped down
Hamley’s escalator and prepared to hit Regent Street in her fashion boots and
designer handbag.

Slowly, realisation dawned upon the child’s face.
The escalator came to the end of its descent and she had to be hauled off by
one arm as herwhole little body froze
in complete disbelief. Then the floodgates opened and a temper tantrum of epic
proportions was released into the pre-Christmas not-so-Silent Night. To be
allowed to visit Dreamland and to touch all those forbidden delights in the
toyshop to end all toyshops and then be expected to go home empty handed? NONONONONOOOOOO......

Yummy Mummy smiled apologetically at the other
harassed parents pulling their curious kiddies away from the fascinating sight
of someone being naughtier than they. Someone who had dared to do what they had
all been dying to do as soon as they had realised that this was merely a
virtual shopping session and their burning desires were not about to be
instantly gratified. A couple of grandmothers down from the North looked on
most disapprovingly and went back to racking their brains for suitable gifts
for their sons-in-law.

“I gave him a hot water bottle cover last year,”
complained one, “but I’m not sure he ever used it. I’d ask for it back, for two
pins. Real nice, it were, too.”

“Aye” sighed the other. ”I don’t understand mine
half the time. This year I asked him ifhe’d like a nice new pair of pyjamas and do you know what he said?”

No, but we were about to.

She stopped abruptly in her tracks as she
remembered the sheer effrontery of it. A group of Japanese tourists trotting up
from behind in overtaking mode slammed into her immovable bulk. Toothy
smiles. Solly. Velly solly.

“ ‘Moother’, ‘e said – I give ‘im that, ‘e does
speak something loovly – ‘Moother’, ‘e said, ‘that is sooo not a
priority.’Do you ‘ave any idea
what that means?”

They strutted off shaking their heads and pondering
the mysteries of the south.

We headed, to my excited anticipation, towards Bond
Street, but I was steered instead into my unfavourite shop where the sales
staff (m) are naked to the waist and the girls have miniskirts the depth of
curtain pelmets and you can't see anything because it is so dark which is just
as well since the price tags are not exactly Primark and I proceeded to have a
panic attack which cost me because no way could I leave my daughter in that den
of iniquity without a credit card.

Perhaps we could have a full stop here somewhere.

So I left her to it and sauntered on up past all
the luxury retailers whilst she sorted the entire family’s Abercrombie and Fitch
Christmas presents.

And a very happy tartan-shirted, raggedy-jeansed,
logo-plastered sweatshirt Christmas to you all, I thought.

Wednesday, 25 October 2017

I am invited to go to London for a big book
launch of “Sorting the Priorities” this month at the Italian Embassy.

I log into the latest low cost airline options –
well perhaps not Ryan this time, Easy Jet will do fine. I can take the slinky,
screws up into a ball, Emilio Pucci
number in bright pink which swears so nicely with my red hair and has the
daughters groaning in desperation.

And the flat straw almost matching handbag
purchased from a Corsican market. And the pair of matching shoes, (yes,
daughters, your mother still does matching shoes and handbag whenever she can…)
and it will all stuff nicely into an approved Easy suitcase, give or take a bit
of encouragement from someone sitting on it.

I notice Himself
is studying a shiny new map of France that I didn’t know we possessed. A
particularly large map of France which, now I think about it, I am quite sure
we didn’t possess before because we don’t have a table large enough to spread it on.

“We could” he
says, drive from Rome to Alessandria. Stay the night in Alessandria and then
head on to Beaune, and Troyes, via Monte Bianco, I think, then stop the night…. Be
there in two days no problem.”

“Four” I say,
knowing his reputed intention to be late for his own funeral but at the same
time hyperventilating at the idea of all
that extra luggage I could stow in a car.

“Or maybe take a
detour around Bordeaux......pick up a
couple of bottles in Champagne.” Ah! Now we were getting to the real reason.
The cellar, as he euphemistically calls it, has been looking decidedly moth-eaten
recently. Not least because of my well known partiality for the odd thimbleful
of that light and amusing sparkling liquid with the charming nose of apple sauce, freshly baked bread and a hint of
honey which goes down a treat leaving a suspicion of strawberries and cream on
the discerning palate. I quote or misquote the experts, of course. I myself
merely use it for medicinal purposes and, when desperate, to encourage the fluttering
of the muse.

We sauntered through France and toddled across the Channel on the P&O Ferry just for old times’ sake and because it was cheaper than the tunnel, with the odd bottle of fizz already fizzing nicely in the boot. The book launch was a triumph

and with immense restraint I refrained from cracking open one of the bottles just to make sure it had survived the journey. And three days later, just when it had settled down again, we heaved it back amongst the luggage which, in the manner of luggage the world over, had quadrupled itself in the meantime, and headed back down to the coast.

Storm Brian was hot on the heels of Hurricane Ophelia and caught up with her just as we were driving into the port of Dover. No budding starletfaced by a bulky Weinstein ever put up a braver fight. How ever do they keep all those juggernauts from skidding down to one end and hurling themselves into the foaming brine? The waves were crashing over the sides of the ship and a foot of water was swirling merrily along the decks. After an hour and a half of violent juddering and rolling, the Captain, oozing charm and confidence, asked everybody, ever so nicely, to sit down whilst he performed a necessary manoeuvre which he regretted might be ever so slightly uncomfortable, to set us back on course for Calais.

Nobody moved since nobody, except for a few hardened lorry drivers and a couple of half-drunk students, had even considered trying to stand up in the first place. Strangely, P&O’s special offer of tea and scones with whipped cream was not proving too popular either, and it was with a united sigh of relief that we all staggered groggily down to our cars and drove out to greet the black and lowering skies of northern France.We were spending the night with a fellow author near St. Quentin and since he had just finished that most boring of chores, re-reading the proofs of his latest work and was celebrating with a small party, it seemed only fair to crack open a bottle in mutual celebration. I slid a couple unseen into the freezer upon arrival.

The first one exploded as, refreshed and fragrant, we were descending the staircase prior to greeting the other assembled guests. Mine host, a former war zone correspondent, dived immediately behind the sofa without so much as a second thought. His wife hoofed it to the downstairs loo and locked herself inside while the shitzu cum poodle hybrid, with amazing agility for one with such short legs, hurled itself straight through the back door into the garden. The rest of us stood there awaiting developments until realisation suddenly dawned. Shamefacedly I ran into the kitchen and rescued the other bottle which, with appalling timing, shot its entire contents all over the pooshit just as it had decided that anything was preferable to the raging storm outside. Oh well. Like I said, the book launch went down a treat and not all of life can be a bed of roses.

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

One very important aspect of diplomatic etiquette is, of course, the
bread and butter thank you letter. Also known as the day after letter. Ideally
this should be written (for the English) on deckle-edged personalised notepaper
in a subtle shade of white, pale cream or something equally uncontroversial,
with matching and lined envelope. Of necessity, one should mention how warm and
charming were one’s hosts and their beautiful residence, how intellectually
stimulating and extraordinarily witty the conversation, how innovative the menu
and succulent the food, how wonderful it was to meet old friends and make some
new ones, how fortunate one had considered oneself to be seated next to two
such enthralling conversationalists as those to one’s left and right……You get
the picture.

Traditions, however, differ greatly.

Italians, for example, rarely bother to set pen to
paper at all. They prefer to express their thanks via a phone call. Thus, if
you are an Italian hostess and wish to achieve anything at all the day after
giving a dinner party, you are well advised to Be Unavailable for the entire 24
hours and just leave the answering machine on.

I was feeling particularly grateful for this solution
just the other day for it permitted me to leave a succinct but hopefully
elegant little thank-you message for a particularly volublefriend who had been using me as a sauf-douleur for her matrimonial
woes for the past six months. Her temporary absence saved me, at a conservative
estimate, a good forty minutes of sympathetic listening. I had reckoned without
her most kindly ringing me back to say thank you for my thank you.

The call came just as I was applying my left shoulder,
(the one with the torn ligament), to a rusty gate in an attempt to get through
it without letting three large and very excited thoroughbred horses escape to
the freedom for which they were fighting. Underfoot was a puddle the size of
Lake Ontario and a muddy bog which needed some careful circumventing if I were
to remain upright and capable of heaving and shoving gate and horses out of my
path.

I was also having one of those coughing fits where
your eyes stream, your voice disappears and you need to get to a glass of water
immediately if you are not to die. A howling north-easterly was blowing a gale
across the fields and a recently stitched finger - mistaken for a carrot by
afore mentioned over enthusiastic animals,(memo to self: abandon horse riding for less dangerous sport), was
aching in the freezing cold without a glove because in that particular hand I
was holding the damn cell phone. I mentioned some of this in passing to my
voluble friend and some of it I guess she could have figured out for herself by
interpreting the various noises hitting her down the phone line.

Did that stop her?

No. She went on for a good
half an hour about her recent divorce settlement and I was reduced to saying “I
do think you should appeal,” about one hundred times because what else do you
say when she isn't really listening to you anyway? And besides, I had a gut
feeling she wouldn't dream of appealing because, know what? I suspect she
realises she's pushed her luck over the years and doesn't stand a chance of
squeezing another penny out of the poor sod.

But times are changing and etiquette has moved on.

Nowadays the younger generation, even at diplomatic
level, resort to dashing off an email at any time of day or night to say “thank
you for dinner last night/last week”. Or worse still, they actually REFUSE invitations from their own Ambassador (aka God in my generation of dip wives, since
his word was most certainly law and his invitations were most certainly not to
be refused should he be so magnanimous as to extend one to a mere underling). To
add insult to injury, these young whippersnappers do so with the frailest of
excuses such as that their mother in law
just died, or they have a child in bed with meningitis or can’t get a babysitter.

Can’t get a Babysitter? What do you DO with the
taxpayers’ money, for heaven’s sake? What’s £30 an hour compared to an evening
basking in the presence of such an august personage as that of His Excellency
your very own esteemed Ambassador?

In my day we would have been shipped off pronto as
Third Secretary to Ouagadougou on a one way ticket.

Friday, 30 June 2017

There was a group of Americans down in St. Jean Cap
Ferrat doing the Alphabet Tour.

It was Friday. Friday was France. Saturday was Spain
and Sunday was Sicily. Thursday had been The U.K., which I thought was pushing
it a bit, but they didn’t seem to mind. Monday would be Malta. I was slightly
worried about Tuesday and Wednesday but they assured me with some excitement
that the former was To Be Announced and the latter was Wherever. It was an
Adventure Tour. They actually thought they were in Cap d’Antibes but the tour
operator had muddled up the two Caps, an easy mistake since both locations have
luxury hotels of the same name, so they were being shuffled up and down the
coast in an overly large coach which was contributing dramatically to the
snarling up of the already snarled traffic all along the Corniche. They didn’t
seem to mind that either. You got better pictures that way, apparently.

We had been slightly worried about turning up at the
Party of the Year in a dusty rented Fiat Punto smelling of stale tobacco and,
by now, splattered with road kill - albeit of the six-legged winged variety.
Himself wanted to put it through a car wash but I demurred. Let them think we
had just driven up from a Safari, said I. Much more glamorous. I also pointed
out that it was 8.00 pm which left us precisely half an hour to get showered,
dressed, made-up and out the door.

There was a little note attached to an exquisite
flower arrangement in our room welcoming us and informing us that we would be
picked up in front of the hotel at 8.15.Right.Good news bad news. Saved
from the dirty Fiat dilemma, at least.

We scrub up something lovely the pair of us after a
lifetime of doing it against the clock, but it does require a good twenty minutes
to achieve the required effect. Twenty-five if a bow tie is involved, which of
course it was. Wrestling a bow tie single-handedly into submission is not
something Himself has ever managed to achieve during his lifetime and it is
invariably presented to me with a request for assistance just when I have two
finger nails left to varnish. Purple. To match the toes. I do hope you have been following. We are
nothing if not colour co-ordinated. Or anal, as some would have it. There is
nothing I can do about that: I belong to a generation which still matches its
accessories. When I remember to pack them.

We shot out of the hotel lift and through the
revolving glass doors in the manner of a brace of dervishes on their way to the
carnival.

There were a dozen or so extraordinarily elegant
couples standing in the forecourt checking their Audemars Piguets as we tumbled
out at their feet. The men were all uniformly dressed in impeccably tailored
white dinner jackets, the ladies in full length ball gowns and drooling with
jewels. I regretted having omitted to pack a wonderful diamond cuff which a
friend had bought me from the local street market in Rome just before we
left. I endeavoured, none too successfully since it was required for balance,
to keep my left hand – the one carrying the uncoordinated handbag - out of
sight behind my back whilst shaking hands with my right. I was making insignificant small talk in three and a bit languages
about the weather and the non-appearance of the minibus when this sleek, highly
polished black Rolls came purring to a halt at our feet and a sleek, highly polished,
colour co-ordinated driver stepped out, consulted his list and read out our
names. Leaving the rest of them standing there wondering who the hell we were.
We smiled apologetically to the waiting hopefuls and slid gracefully into the
padded leather upholstery. Awfully
sorry.

Well, how were they to know our surname begins with
anA?

Bet the Americans would have twigged it, though.
Americans are hot on things like that.

(...and don't forget there are more Ambassadress Trying to Behave episodes in

Sunday, 11 June 2017

DEMOCRACY AT ITS
MOST DEMOCRATIC

😤
YES 🙅NO😖WHO ? 🙉WHATEVER💨LATER

There are ways
and means of clouding the issues, of course.

First and foremost you need to
phrase the questions in such a manner that your average voter won’t understand
what is being asked of him. Her. Other.

The first time I voted in Italy was in a popular
referendum in the summer of 2011. The difference between a popular
and a constitutional referendum is that in the former you vote "Yes" to
abolish the law under discussion, whereas in the latter you vote "Yes" to
support it. So if you really wanted to say NO to Berlusconi and his favourite
laws, you had to put YES on your ballot sheet. Also, ideally you should have
been aware of the name, number, paragraph and subsection of whichever law was
being referred to. The papers had been full of diagrams and explanations for
weeks, but there was so much other more riveting news to absorb that one had
tended to skip the legal stuff and head for the juicy bits

.

Where Berlusconi
was concerned, there was never a lack of juicy bits.

Thus I found
myself heading off to vote that summerbearing a stick-it note with "NONONOSI" scrawled on it.
Or perhaps it was "SISISINO", I really don’t remember. My main worry was not
getting to the church on time, since not only was it rush hour, it was also
none too clear where, after a lifetime of moving house and country, I
was supposed to be registered. Under my maiden name.Over forty years
of marriage, two children and five grandchildren, but I am still not permitted
to use my married name on any official document in Italy.

I drove out to
the borough we had inhabited way back in the seventies where, according to
Rome city council computers, I still resided.

I know better than try to argue
with a Rome city council computer and I most definitely knew better than to try
to argue with one of its computer operators. Eventually I reached the
designated secondary school way over on the other side of town just before they
closed the polling station.

When I finally drew up in a cloud of dust,
(we do dust in Rome - especially at that timeof year,)
outside my not very local and not-at-all friendly polling booth with just seven
minutes to spare before they closed, parked on top of two police cars thereby
blocking their escape route for what I hilariously had thought would be a mere
70 seconds, (just enough time to place My Cross against all the opposite answers
to what I was voting for,) it was to be asked, with much sucking of pencil and
no little embarrassment, whether I knew where the letter "J"
was positioned in the alphabet?

And do you know
what? I did. I really did.

Between "I" and "K", I answered
with some pride, Whilst looking anxiously at my watch. Three minutes down and
four to go.

Silence.

Ms. Voluntary Pensucker starts over again from A and flips
her way laboriously through to Z, Swearing audibly. Just her luck. Three
minutes (by now) to closing time and she gets the foreigner called Jackson.

Maybe, she said
hopefully, they stuck it at the end? With the zebras and zippers.

Try again,
this time starting from the end and reading backwards.

You should know
that the letter J does not figure in the Italian alphabet. Kiddies in play
school go straight from I for Illiterate to K for Kleptomania.I mused silently, not wishing to disturb her
laborious train of thought.

O.K. Time's UP!!

Sigh of relief
all round.

Go home and
watch it on the tele.

Except, of
course, I didn't have a tele.

Maybe that
explains everything. One tele, one vote. No tele, no vote. though in the
end it transpired that I was not going to help change the face of Italian
politics singlehandedly anyway.

The postal vote for the Brexit referendum on the other
hand, was a cross between Painting by Numbers and an Ikea self- assembly kit.
Two little boxes. Choose one. Eeny meeny miney mo.

Next take piece of paper A
and fold along line B. Insert in envelope C and seal before slotting carefully
into postbox D. A literary style reminiscent of a Delia Smith recipe.

For U.K. based
voters insome constituencies, notably
Bristol, you didn’t even need to make a choice, it was all done for you with a
picture of a pencil hovering over just one of the two boxes. The one for
remaining in Europe. Easy Peasy. There. Piece of cake. All the
intellectually challenged would vote to stay in because that was where the
hovering pencil indicated they should place their X.The Remainers couldn’t lose.

Well that worked
well, didn’t it?

So now we wait
for Scotland. I can see the graphics already. A kilted Scotsman building
an impenetrable wall of haggis and threatening any invading Englishman with the
wrong end of his bagpipes whilst simultaneously dipping his French croissant
into a melted Mars Bar.

Monday, 29 May 2017

We are endeavouring to be on our best behaviour at
this time of the year. We have disturbed memories, you see. Last Easter weekend
saw Beagle and me qualifying for Guests From Hell status. On the Sunday morning we had gathered together our bi-national offerings
(Italian olive oil and Cadbury’s Easter eggs), rounded up the dog and tripped
lightly downstairsto stuff it all into
opposite ends of the Chelsea tractor.

Trip was the operative word. A litre ofolive oil goes a horrendously long way on a
marble floor and takes the best part of half an hour and most of the Sunday
Times to mop up. Hound was subsequently inserted with some difficulty
behind the dog-proof iron bars, having picked up the scent of the eggs at 100 yards. I might also
mention at this juncture that Beagle’s personal vision of Paradise consists of
a large meadow dotted with rabbits (real, imaginary or chocolate,) and laced
liberally with fox poo.

We were thus a little late starting out on the
requisite trek to the country for the traditional Easter Egg Hunt.

Technologically Impaired husband watched with some
scepticism as I deftly programmed my girlfriend’s postal code into the GPS and
then turned on the radio. Soothed by the dulcet tones of Ms. Sat Nav, however,
he relaxed sufficiently to obey her instructions for once, instead of arguing
furiously with her disembodied directions at every crossroad.I sank back to listen to the
chewing-gum-for-the-ears braying of the Omnibus Edition of the Archers.
Something about the combined effect of these two acoustical elementsmust have dulled our already waning critical
faculties. We had the motorway to ourselves and had made up for nearly all our
lost time as we swung triumphantly through the gates and up the drive to our
hosts’ magnificent residence. Blindly obeying our front and rear sensors, we parked
expertly between a Land Rover and a Bentley and began to unload.

Realisation hit the pair of us more or less
simultaneously. It was the wrong host. Wrong lunch party. Wrong girlfriend.
Wrong post code. Clearly there was an Easter lunch in progress here too –
witness the cars all over the drive. But not the one to which we had been
invited.

It is not an easy feat to back a 4 x 4 silently out of
a gravel drive with a Beagle howling to get out for a sniff at one’s non-host’s
lurchers’ backsides, but we managed it. Except that having scrunched back up to
the main road spitting gravel to left and right, somehow the main gates had
closed on us…..

The good news was that I had, at least, chosen the
right county, and after a highly apologetic phone call to explain in graphic
detail the tremendous traffic jams we were encountering on the M20, we finally
reached, as Ms. Sat Nav sexily remarked, our destination.

Our real host had been obliged to open an additional
bottle of fizz which had clearly not overly amused him. His guests were
starving and pie-eyed. The cook was threatening to resign as she watched her
succulent pink lamb turning to strips of grey leather. Beagle had an immediate
fight with the house Labrador about who had territorial rights over the last
remaining smoked salmon canapé left on the plate for Miss Manners. The children
sulked throughout lunch refusing to eat anything at all because they had been
deprived of their Sunday morning egg hunt.

I slipped out into the garden as soon as coffee had
been served and started to hide the eggs in as many Beagle-proof places as I
could find. This, I realise in retrospect, also rendered them completely
invisible and unattainable to anyone under the age of 15 or below 6ft in
stature. The oldest child was four and a half, though with the lungs of a
thirty year old coloratura.